paper

The MOSDEF Survey: The strong agreement between H-alpha and UV-to-FIR star formation rates for z~2 star-forming galaxies

arXiv:1603.02284 · doi:10.3847/2041-8205/820/2/L23

Abstract

We present the first direct comparison between Balmer line and panchromatic SED-based SFRs for z~2 galaxies. For this comparison we used 17 star-forming galaxies selected from the MOSFIRE Deep Evolution Field (MOSDEF) survey, with detections for H and at least two IR bands (Spitzer/MIPS 24m and Herschel/PACS 100 and 160m, and in some cases Herschel/SPIRE 250, 350, and 500m). The galaxies have total IR (8-1000m) luminosities of and star-formation rates (SFRs) of . We fit the UV-to-far-IR SEDs with flexible stellar population synthesis (FSPS) models - which include both stellar and dust emission - and compare the inferred SFRs with the SFR(H,H) values corrected for dust attenuation using Balmer decrements. The two SFRs agree with a scatter of 0.17 dex. Our results imply that the Balmer decrement accurately predicts the obscuration of the nebular lines and can be used to robustly calculate SFRs for star-forming galaxies at z~2 with SFRs up to . We also use our data to assess SFR indicators based on modeling the UV-to-mid-IR SEDs or by adding SFR(UV) and SFR(IR), for which the latter is based on the mid-IR only or on the full IR SED. All these SFRs show a poorer agreement with SFR(H,H) and in some cases large systematic biases are observed. Finally, we show that the SFR and dust attenuation derived from the UV-to-near-IR SED alone are unbiased when assuming a delayed exponentially declining star-formation history.

arXiv comment7 pages, 5 figures, to be published in ApJ Letters

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